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Disinformation Techniques: A Glossary

Rick Berman: "Dr. Evil"

[00:00:00] Dr Little, have any cancer causing agents been identified and cigarets. No, none. Whatever, either in cigarets or in any product of smoking as such. What are the conclusions reached by your organization that there is need for much more research over a wide area? And, in my opinion, to single out smoking as a causal agent is on the evidence to date completely unjustified.

[00:00:30] In 1952, Dr Richard Dahl published a groundbreaking study in the UK. It linked smoking to lung cancer. Here he is much later in life talking about those early days of research and how that research was received.

[00:00:48] The media were, of course, against us for a long time, and whenever they announced a new observation on the harmful effects of smoking is like is not there, in demand announced it would be smoking a cigaret, or they would have someone else get up through tobacco industry and say, Well, it is controversial. Somebody else doesn't believe it.

[00:01:10] The following year in the US, Dr Ernst Winder showed another devastating link between tobacco and cancer. Winder and his team painted tobacco tars from cigaret smoke onto the backs of mice. 44 percent of the lab animals developed malignant tumors,

[00:01:28] according to this repeated nationwide survey. More doctors smoke camels than any other cigaret, and

[00:01:34] there was me thinking the medical establishment was anti-cancer. It would take nearly 20 years before those sorts of ads were banned. But the tobacco industries campaign to discredit the science on smoking and cancer showed no signs of stopping. In a lot of ways, this is a well-known story. Plenty of folks have seen the insider.

[00:01:58] You go public and 30 million people hear what you got to say. Nothing. I mean, nothing will ever be the same again. Now, the work we did here is confidential, not for public scrutiny anymore than on one's family matters. We're very serious about protecting our interests.

[00:02:20] And some know about the shady scientists who work for tobacco and went on to work for the oil industry thanks to the work of Naomi Oreskes and Erik Conway and their book The Merchants of Doubt.

[00:02:32] The important thing that we thought we had discovered in our research about thought we thought people needed to understand was that actually the roots of this story are not found in the fossil fuel industry. There, found in the tobacco industry. And in fact, there was there is a direct connection between climate change denial and the denial of the harms of tobacco in the in the actual person of this man, Fredrick Sykes, who was the founding director of the George C. Marshall Institute but also worked for six years as the director of biomedical research for the R.J. Reynolds Tobacco Company.

[00:03:04] But we're going to explore a lesser known side of the story today. The PR guy who developed the industry's spin on science, a rather unassuming dude who wore navy suits and tiny little specks and would seem right at home speaking at the weekly Rotary Club meeting in Columbus, Ohio. The silent but deadly. John Hill, even his name is sort of forgettable, but his impact was decidedly not. Welcome back to Rechte The Story of Disinformation, a podcast about the war for hearts and minds and science right here on U.S. soil. I'm Amy Westervelt, today's trick: science denial.

[00:03:47] This is Dan Zegart. I have been for most of my life. Investigative reporter and I. I wrote a book called Civil Warriors Legal Siege on the Tobacco Industry.

[00:04:00] After Civil Warriors, Zegart kept researching tobacco's efforts to sell the American public on their products. One name kept coming up. You guessed it John W. Hill.

[00:04:13] When I was researching my my book, a bunch of documents were released by actually by congressmen that dealt with Helen Norton's original corporate building of the denial machine that became so well known, which started in 1954.

[00:04:35] Hill & Knowlton is the firm John Hill ran with his partner Don Knowlton. But Hill wasn't always in PR. John Hill was born on a farm in Indiana in 1890. His grandfather had been very wealthy, but his father lost all the family's money in a series of business deals gone wrong and hell would spend the rest of his life chasing the company and approval of rich men. You could say he had sugar daddy issues like a lot of our other PR guys. He started his career as a journalist before he turned to the dark side. But unlike the others, he seems to have been fairly good at it. Hill was a financial and business reporter for 17 years before he got into the PR game. He even started a couple of newspapers himself. Although he struggled to keep them afloat, some things never change.

[00:05:37] In 1920, in Ohio, he took his first step into the PR world when he was hired to create a newsletter for Cleveland's Union Trust Co., a bank. By this time, he was the financial editor of a steel industry trade magazine. Because Ohio, these jobs put him in regular contact with executives around town, and eventually Hill saw a niche he could fill. Helping companies explain themselves to reporters didn't get the steel industry. In other words, they didn't think capitalism was frickin awesome. Hill opened up his own firm in 1927 with Union Trust and Otis Steel as his first clients. Because Hill was well-liked by local executives, word spread fast, and within a couple of months he was doing PR for United alloy Steel Republic Steel and Standard Oil of Ohio. In 1953, Hill was tapped to help another industry struggling to maintain a good relationship with the public tobacco. Here's Danziger again, reading from a chapter of his as yet unpublished but copyrighted book Addiction Inc..

[00:06:49] John W. Hill, the founder of the public relations giant Hill and Knowlton, had just walked into his office on the thirty fifth floor of the Empire State Building. When he got an emergency call from Tommy Ross, who handled public relations for the American Tobacco Company, Public Relations was a new and still small business at midcentury. Hill and Ross sought each other's advice and met occasionally at watering holes in midtown Manhattan. So Hill wasn't really talking to a competitor on the morning of December 14th, 1953. Ross painted a startling picture at this moment, he said. The chief executives of six of the seven major tobacco companies are in a suite at the Plaza Hotel on 59th Street, trying to figure out how to stave off the collapse of their industry. It has started two weeks earlier with the release of a sensational study by a scientist at the Sloan Kettering Institute that found cigaret tar produced cancerous lesions in mice. The latest in a series of ominous findings over the previous four years, strongly linking cigaret smoking with lung cancer. And just six days before Ross is cool on December 8th, Dr. Alton Ochsner, a thoracic surgeon and pioneer, a lung cancer researcher, gave a speech in New York in which he said that quote the male population of the United States will be decimated unless some steps are taken to remove the cancer producing factors from cigarets close quote. Tobacco stocks dropped four points after decades of continuous growth. Cigaret sales began a steep decline.

[00:08:49] Hill met with those panicked executives in their suite at the Plaza the next morning. Later, he wrote in his autobiography Quote, After being admitted to their suite, I found the tobacco man sitting there looking mighty glum. I thought, Here is a group of men who consider themselves good upright citizens being held up before the country as killers who came up with a genius strategy to help them. The tobacco execs wanted him to deliver a Pro cigaret campaign that would discredit the recent studies. But Hill advised them that that wasn't enough. They also needed to fund new scientific research that would contradict the studies connecting smoking to cancer. This was a much bigger project than just running a PR campaign and a new tactic for an industry on the edge of a public opinion precipice. The exact said OK, and a few weeks later, the Tobacco Industry Research Committee, TIRC was born.

[00:09:51] Now, fake experts weren't new. We know this. Even fake research institutes existed before John W. Hill. You Might remember the Bureau of Railroad Economics from episode one created by Massacre Re Brander and train nerd Ivy Lee all the way back in 1890. But John Hill was going to take fake expertize to a whole new level. The Tobacco Industry Research Committee never claimed to be independent, but their research was taken seriously even by the most legit journalists of the day. Edward R. Murrow himself When I first heard this story, I was not shocked exactly because it's the sort of thing that you still kind of see today, but surprised that it happened way back then into Murrow himself. So I called up Mary Annaise Heglar, a writer and my frequent partner in podcasting.

[00:10:46] The long standing idea in science, and it's still very much the case today, is that if you are good at communicating, you must be bad at science,

[00:10:59] and I will never understand the logic of that. No matter how many times you tell me that story is never going to make any kind of sense.

[00:11:07] It doesn't right? really. It really doesn't. But anyway, it's very much a thing in the scientific field. So on top of the fact that they're training these scientists to be very good speakers. They also know that that the scientists on the other side are are not going to be getting this training and they're probably going to be bad at communicating the science that they're doing.

[00:11:31] right, they're playing chess and we're over here playing Tic TAC Toe.

[00:11:36] So in 1955, Edward R. Murrow, who's like a very well-regarded journalist, there's a radio award named after him. All this stuff, he has this.

[00:11:48] Yes, he has this TV show where he does, you know, it's like very, you know, he's like tackling the hard hitting news of the day, all that kind of stuff. And so he decides to do a two part series on this new research about smoking and cancer. And he has on all of these like, you know, logit, all the researchers who have been doing the work showing the link between cigarets and cancer. And then he has on a bunch of people from the Tobacco Industry Research Committee and the tobacco guys again, like all, are very spoken. Murrow, like, like, spent more time talking to the tobacco funded researchers, in part because, like the interview was going better. Right? This is really key to understanding the genius of science denial, both the bias toward people who are media trained, who do a good job of presenting their case, their story, their point of view to the media. That bias is still very entrenched, particularly on TV and radio, but then also the bias against being good at those things. If you're a scientist, which is a really big problem when the public needs to understand science and a very easy thing for industry to weaponize.

[00:13:14] Here's Dan Zegart with more of the tobacco story.

[00:13:18] And the industry had gone out way out on a limb and said that it was not. It was not only going to be vigilant, but if it found something that was in cigarets that cause cancer, it would, you know, it would halt, stop everything and take very dramatic action and make sure that it was removed. So that was the standard that they had set themselves. But the thing was that when Murrow went out and did it and went out, and actually he had very little to do with finding the he himself who was, you know, probably the preeminent. A figure at that point in television journalism had very little to do with actually picking the people who were interviewed, the scientists who were interviewed were mostly picked by Fred Friendly, who is his producer. These were eminent people. These were Elmer Hess, who was the president of the American Medical Association. It was W. C. Hooper who was an important figure at the National Cancer Institute. It was Dr. Paul Coton who was an environmental cancer specialist out in Los Angeles. And all of these guys were in one way or another, compromised by the industry. They had taken there, either they were already on the payroll or, in the case of Coton, were actually members of the Tobacco Industry Research Council, which was this front group they had set up.

[00:14:33] Here's a snippet from the two part series Murrow did about cigarets and cancer on his show. Seeing Now in 1955,

[00:14:43] filter tips represented less than two percent of the total in 1952. In 1955, more than 20 percent are filter tips, and the figure is rising. There is a clear indication that the relationship between cigarets and Health has caused this change. The cigaret industry aware of this fact and fully cognizant of its responsibility, has organized the Tobacco Industry Research Committee. Its scientific director is the eminent cancer investigator, Dr. Clarence Cooke, little head of the Jackson Memorial Laboratory at Bar Harbor, Maine. Dr Little, have any cancer causing agents been identified and cigarets. No, none. Whatever, either in cigarets or in any product of smoking as such. This is interesting in a way because there are many known cancer forming substances in time. It is interesting that certain of the published data seem to show an association between certain types of cancer, but perhaps cancer in general and excessive use of cigarets. Now, we're very interested in finding out what kind of people are heavy smokers and what kind are not. Not everybody is a smoker. Not everybody who smokes is equal a heavy smoker. And what determines these selections on the part of people? Is it a different nervous type of person that smokes a great deal? Is it a person who is reacting differently to a strain of stress because it is very clear that certain people just can't take it as well as others?

[00:16:38] I mean, if you can separate yourself from from like how awful it is, it's very smart. It's like like this guy is being asked, is there any correlation between smoking and cancer? And then he kind of goes like, Well, you know, what about the other causes of cancer? Certain types of people who are very anxious types of people might not handle cigarets as well as other types of people. That's diabolical. Yeah. Dan Zegart again.

[00:17:13] But if you look a little deeper, you found was every single one of these guys was had it essentially either been been bought and paid for and was on the staff or was about to be and those relationships were not disclosed fully. Some of the people were not on yet actually working for the Turk, but they were about to be or they were already had a relationship and were carefully selected by the industry to be put forward. The point here is that, you know, these were eminent people and actually when Fred friendly got a call from one of the tobacco guys and they asked him, Well, how is it going? How's your program going with Murrow? And he said it's going pretty well, but if anything, I think it's going to make. It's going to make the tobacco industry look better than these scientists because your people are better at explaining their more definite. And of course, this is what it's possible to be more definite when you are really espousing a particular point of view and you were paid mouthpiece. Yeah. And that's the great advantage that these guys have always had this particular wing of the scientific community.

[00:18:25] The tobacco industry scientists weren't just definitive because they had an opinion. They also had the benefit of Hill and Knowlton Media Training

[00:18:34] Hill and Noel and put these people through their paces, particularly Clarence, Dr Clarence Cooke, little who they spent weeks and weeks with, getting him ready and talking to him and just trying to understand how he was going to come off. As time went on, the industry got even better at grooming people and went to great lengths to woo scientists to get them to do a research project for them.

[00:19:01] This strategy worked great for decades.

[00:19:05] The result of this whole campaign by tobacco was that it was completely effective. They found as they looked, there is a great deal material on this, in the tobacco files, in the documents that are found that you can find that were produced in the lawsuits where they go back and they say there's very, very little in the way of interest now in smoking in health. This is 18 months after the tobacco broadcast by Murrow. So they it's amazing because this is a very small group of people, a few scientists, some public relations, public relations firm, you know, and a handful of companies. And they completely change the public dialog about the most pressing health concern, probably of the 20th century, which was smoking the pandemic. And that's not an exaggeration of smoking related illnesses millions of people a year worldwide.

[00:20:01] There are a couple things to pay attention to in this story about how well the Tobacco Industry Research Committee and Murrow. The first is that while this tactic is generally referred to as science denial, it's also misdirection. The tobacco industry folks did deny certain scientific facts. Or at least cast doubt on them. But what really made this multi-decade campaign work was the way they obscured the link between cigarets and cancer by flooding the public sphere with studies on all the other causes of cancer. This is the story of PR, not comic books, but after the break, we're going to meet one of the self-described supervillains of this story. By day, a sort of average conservative public relations guy, but under the cover of darkness, Dr. Evil. More on him after the break. Another big figure in tobacco lobbying is the infamous PR guy, Richard Berman. He's so notorious that 60 Minutes once dubbed him Dr. Evil. And today he actually uses that to sell himself in proposals. Although I'm not sure where that Ph.D. is from. Can you get funding to do a doctorate in evil? I think I'm just going to call him Mr. Evil until he can produce his degree. Just plain old dick evil. Richard Berman was once described as a quote Despicable man, an exploiter, a scoundrel, a world historical motherfucking son of a bitch by his son, the late David Berman. Music fans might know that name. He was a poet and the lead singer of the band Silver Jews, but he and his father did not get along. Richard Berman was just to evil. Here he is, speaking to a roomful of fracking executives about how to keep the anti-fracking folks at bay.

[00:22:11] Yes, you played in people's minds a time. They don't know who's right and you win all ties because the tide basically ensures the status quo. People are not prepared to get aggressive in moving one way or the other. So we all take a tie any day if I'm trying to preserve the status quo.

[00:22:29] This tape was recorded by someone in the audience who subsequently leaked it to the New York Times, so it's pretty hard to hear. But what Berman is saying there is he'll take a tie any day if he's trying to preserve the status quo. In other words, these tactics don't have to win. They don't have to convince the public to like fracking. They just have to tie because people who aren't sure about an issue won't campaign for change and the status quo carries on. That's the goal with campaigns like the ones Berman does and also like the one hell cooked up for Big Tobacco. They don't need to convince people that smoking is good for them, or even not bad. They just need to confuse the issue enough to stop any big changes. Maybe smoking's bad. Maybe it's fine. The science sure seems confusing. In 1964, the U.S. surgeon general released a report that backed up the research Dahl and Weiner and others had done for decades.

[00:23:34] This book, containing 387 carefully worded pages, is a federal government report. Its title Smoking and Health, a report of the Advisory Committee to the Surgeon General of the Public Health Service. It was released at noon today, and it says in view of the continuing and mounting evidence from many sources, it is the judgment of the committee that cigaret smoking contributes substantially to mortality from certain specific diseases and to the overall death rate.

[00:24:03] It still took another six years for the government to ban cigaret ads on TV and radio, and 25 years after that for a series of lawsuits to reveal the truth about all the research tobacco companies had suppressed, particularly with respect to how addictive nicotine was, how much they knew about that addictiveness, and how much they used that information to hook people on their product. When those lawsuits went to trial, many of the same scientists who had been trained to speak to the media turned up as witnesses. Hill and Knowlton had picked them for that very reason,

[00:24:41] being very canny assessments of this person's personality, how they would play and therefore developed a stable of people who not only would speak for, let's say, the press, but would also testify before Congress and appear in in trials as lawsuits began to be filed. These became there, litigation ready experts, and they were really formidable. They won, obviously, because they won every case that was ever filed against them until 1996. That's a pretty good record. That's for 42 years. That's a pretty good record.

[00:25:17] That brings us to another key part of this story. And this show, a lot of people think public relations just means media relations, getting stories in the papers, securing interviews for company exacts that kind of thing. But the people and tactics that we're talking about go way beyond that. Public relations guys like John W. Hill or Ivy Lee or Edward Bernays, they would call people who only deal with the media side of things. Press agents. And they would do it with a certain level of disdain for them. Public relations meant literally dealing with the public or really several publics. There was the general public. And then there's also legislators there, another public, another audience to be convinced, confused or calmed by these arguments. Businesspeople were a public women, youth, mothers, employees. In the case of Tobacco, Hill and Knowlton worked to improve the general public's view of the industry, but also to ingratiate the industry within the scientific community and with legislators. When the science makes your product look really bad because you know it causes cancer or creates superbugs or sets the ocean on fire. You need a strategy to distract people from all that. Hill's approach to science, denial and distraction has been used by multiple industries in the decades since Big Tobacco had its day in court. Climate change is an obvious example. The fossil fuel industry suppresses information, hires experts and spokespeople to cast doubt on climate science. Misdirects attention toward other causes of the problem. And even highlights the benefits of CO2.

[00:26:58] The scientific evidence remains

[00:27:02] as to whether human activities affect the global climate CO2.

[00:27:06] OK, this is gas of life, so if they want to tell you their CO2 is dangerous, you tell them to stop reading, right?

[00:27:15] We are changing the conversation about climate and carbon dioxide, a mild warming gas and a powerful plant food. We know the benefits of CO2. Food can be grown where it wasn't ground before. It has increased crop harvest by a third. Farmers pump it into their greenhouses to produce more food for your family. NASA's satellites tell the story CO2 has greenes the globe in the last 100 years.

[00:27:43] All of those people you just heard are funded by the fossil fuel industry. The chemical industry uses this tactic often to. Here's how a few industry spokespeople talked about the recent finding connecting glyphosate to cancer. Glyphosate is a key ingredient in the popular weed killer roundup.

[00:28:04] It will do no harm. No, it is not. Glyphosate is not a carcinogen.

[00:28:08] We do not believe that glyphosate in Argentina is causing increases in cancer. You can drink a whole

[00:28:14] quart of it, and it won't hurt you. If you want to drink some, we have some here. I'd be happy to actually. Not, not really. But not really. I know it wouldn't hurt me. Roundup and glyphosate products are vital to farmers around the world and not only large scale farmers, but also vital to smallholder farmers.

[00:28:33] As a scientist is very disappointing seeing all of this misinformation

[00:28:38] about glyphosate online because it is scaring people. Misinformation is beginning to dominate the space, and I'm

[00:28:44] very concerned about the consequences that this will have for agriculture. Several pro-business groups use this tactic recently to create confusion around COVID 19.

[00:28:58] You cannot escape God, not even with the mask or six feet.

[00:29:02] He's blowing the lid off the COVID scandal. The scam, demick. We have it totally under control. It's one person coming in from China. This cycle that we're doing is not stopping anything. It's not preventing the spread. Locking down doesn't work. Here's my evidence. I get a lot of positive calls about it.

[00:29:20] When Mary and I talked to ProPublica health reporter Caroline Chen earlier this year about covering COVID, she said she never had to deal with this tactic on her beat before COVID hit.

[00:29:33] I think that that was something that caught a lot of health journalists by surprise because we were, I think you were used to maybe debating over whether or not high level there should be single payer versus private insurance. You like that kind of you know where you could see people line up in their tents. But. Both sides, I think more traditionally would have reasons for those, and then all of a sudden during the pandemic, I think things like masks but so politicized that I felt like I completely severed from any notion of we want to see what the evidence is here.

[00:30:13] Any time science interferes with profits, it seems this technique shows up. Here's how to spot it. It redirects your attention, pointing to all the other causes of the problem while denying that this one product plays any role at all. It obscures the funding sources of all the studies that point out those other drivers of the problem. It suggests doubt, rather than any particular conclusion. Remember, a tie is a win. The goal is confusion and thus inaction. It goes after the scientists themselves with ad hominem and personal attacks. And as with all fake experts, the overarching message is that you shouldn't worry about whatever problem they're discussing with the powers that be. Have it under control. Remember, the point of these campaigns is to make the science too confusing, to convince you that you have to understand all the details of the science to be able to make a reasonable decision or even have an opinion, and that you're really better off just leaving it to the experts to figure out in the words of Dr. Evil, a tie because a tie is a win when you're trying to maintain the status quo. That's it for this episode next week. A fun story. Why you have PR to thank for Downton Abbey. Thanks for joining us on this little tour of the dark corners of the PR laboratory. Remember to subscribe wherever you get your podcasts to check out all the many horrors these twisted geniuses unleashed on the world. Rigged is an original Critical Frequency production. Lots of documents, photos, videos and other fun facts about the wild world of PR are on our website. Rigged Dot Media. Our producer is Martin's Alz artwork. He also scored this season. Artwork is by Matthew Fleming. Our fact checker is Ashley Braun. Our First Amendment attorney is James Wheaton of the First Amendment project. Big thanks to Mariana's Hagler, who you'll hear throughout this season. If you want to hear more of me and Mary joking around. Check out Hatake, the show we do about climate change. Archival tape in this episode is courtesy of the Library of Congress and Vanderbilt University. The show is reported by me, Amy Westervelt. Thanks for joining us, and we'll see you next time.

S1, Ep3 Transcription

The tactic of science denial is fairly well known these days. In this episode, we dig into a lesser-known aspect: the PR strategy behind science denial, and the origins and architects of that strategy.

Berman Documents

S1, Ep4 | The Birth of SponCon